Purchased a bunch of music through Apple iTunes, but want to listen on non-Apple players? You’ll need to convert AAC and other formats into MP3 for maximal portability. Fortunately, TuneFab Apple Music Converter makes it a breeze…
The fundamental problem with Digital Rights Management is that it changes the meaning of purchasing something without most people realizing what’s happened. You aren’t “buying” the latest Bruno Mars CD or John Grisham audiobook, you’re basically renting the rights to listen to it as long as you stay in the same ecosystem and never stray. Apple is particularly aggressive about this and if you want to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone and keep your purchased music and audio, you’ll quickly find that the files aren’t portable.
Not only that, there are quite a few formats that can produce this sort of problem on your computer, and it’s not just limited to the Mac platform either. The third party program TuneFab Apple Music Converter offers a solution, fortunately, and it can easily tackle files in M4B, AA, AAX and M4P formats, converting them to the far more portable and universal Mp3 or “.mp3” format. Better yet: convert your music or audio books and you’ll find that Windows Media Player, iTunes, and even Web browsers can easily play mp3 files. No loss of functionality, just a gain in portability.
Not only that, but TuneFab Apple Music Converter can also convert music from Apple Music into Mp3 files you can save and listen to later too. Really. Quite a slick feature, really.
To demonstrate the purchased music conversion, let me show you how I converted some of my recent iTunes purchases into Mp3 format to make them more portable…
Let’s start in iTunes for Windows, on a Windows 10 system:
Yeah, I listen to a lot of movie soundtracks. Occupational hazard when you’re a film critic! Choose an album, choose a track, then check out the Properties window by right-clicking on it and you’ll see that purchased music is not in mp3 format:
The key is in the first line: Kind: Purchased AAC audio file. That means that it won’t work on anything other than an Apple-DRM enabled program. Which means, yes, iTunes.
Let’s convert it. To do that, I’m going to just launch TuneFab Apple Music Converter [you can download a demo copy from their Web site or go straight into the purchased copy, but we’ll get to that later in the article]. Notice it scans and finds every track in my Windows iTunes library:
The default settings work great (you can see them all at the bottom) so I’m going to click and check the box adjacent to each track I want to convert then click on the Convert button on the top left. A window pops up and… it starts to convert!
Here’s a progress meter:
Doesn’t take long for the task to finish. But where’s the output?
Check the “Music” folder in your home and you’ll find it:
“TuneFab Apple Music Converter”. Everything you convert ends up there, ready to import into another program, copy to your Android phone, copy it to USB flash drive to listen to in your car, whatever you want to do with it.
And, of course, the files are indeed in unlocked, DRM-free mp3 format:
Double click that file and if you’re in an older version of Windows it’ll launch the venerable Windows Media Player, but in Windows 10? No Windows Media Player. Instead music is played in a program called Groove. Kinda like this:
That’s it. Done. Oh, and you don’t have to convert just one audio file at a time either. You can convert your whole library at once if you really want to give it something to do:
All in all, if you are obsessed with music from an Apple Music playlist, have been on a spending spree buying music or audio books from the Apple Store and enjoying them in iTunes, it’s great to know that you can unlock them all whenever you want with TuneFab Apple Music Converter. And so, how about the price? Turns out that you can get the program for either Mac or Windows: it’s $39.95 for a lifetime license, free upgrades and a 60-day refund if you find it doesn’t meet your needs after all.
Check it out: TuneFab Apple Music Converter (Mac) or TuneFab Apple Music Converter (Windows)
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. The opinions expressed in this review, however, are my own. Don’t steal music or other audio content either. Thanks.